1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to enhancing the ability of a system to respond to an unexpected hardware failure and correctly perform services by, for example either returning a system to a previous level of correct operation, or achieving a degraded level of correct operation.
2. Background Art
Many modern microprocessors have two processor cores on each CPU chip. Due to the sharing of resources, the cores on a given chip must go through their recovery and checkstop sequences together (even if one core did not detect any errors). This has allowed error situations where a large number of failures are indicated in a chip's debug data which may have originated on either core and potentially off chip. These complex error scenarios are becoming increasingly difficult to sort out and debug.